ACRL Continues Opposition to Section 303 of FIRST Act, Restricting Public Acces

ACRL joined 15 other national and regional library, publishing, funding and advocacy organizations in a letter to the House Science Committee expressing strong opposition over the language contained in Section 303 of the ‘Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology Act of 2014’ (FIRST Act). The language in Section 303 of the FIRST Act calls for access to articles reporting on federally funded research to be restricted for up to three years after initial publication, an unnecessarily long delay with potential harm to stakeholders who are not allowed access.

In the letter, the groups support expansion of the successful NIH policy and provisions that provide for:

Immediate deposit of articles to federally owned or approved repositories in formats and under terms that enable their productive reuse, including computational analysis by state-of- the-art technologies;

A maximum embargo period of six months, with the expectation that this maximum will be reduced over time to zero; and

An explicit statement of the terms of use applicable to articles to ensure that their full productive reuse is enabled — including text mining, data mining, and full computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies.

ACRL’s legislative agenda includes increased access to federally funded research as one of our top issues. We encourage you to let your members of Congress know that you oppose language in the proposed FIRST Act to delay public access. Learn more, read talking points and take action.